January 21, 2010

I Don't Know and I Don't Care

Yesterday I wrote

"It is possible that all the front-end work we do to find a suitable brand strategy is terrifically valuable and leads us to brilliant insights that inform our marketing decisions and make our advertising far more effective. And it is equally possible that it is all a bunch of crap.

As far as I know, there's no scientific evidence either way."

The motivation for writing this was a column I read last week by David Brooks in The New York Times. Brooks was writing about the tragedy in Haiti. His point was that it is part natural disaster and part man-made disaster caused by poverty.

In the column he wrote that all the billions of dollars in aid that has been given to Haiti over the years by people and countries who thought they understood the causes and cures for poverty have been ineffective. But, he says, there are some approaches to poverty eradication that seem to work...

...the Harlem Children’s Zone and the No Excuses schools, are led by people who figure they don’t understand all the factors that have contributed to poverty, but they don’t care.

I certainly don't mean to trivialize poverty by using it as a metaphor for what we do in advertising, but there is a lesson for us here.

Most advertisers, and most agencies, would be so much better off if they didn't pretend they understood "all the factors that contributed to" consumer psychology, and instead just focused on changing consumer behavior.

They spend zillions of dollars trying to affect consumer "attitudes" (which almost always prove unshakable) when they should be spending their time and money focused on changing consumer behavior.

Ad Contrarian Says:

"Delusional thinking isn't just acceptable in marketing today -- it's mandatory.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans."

"Social Media: Tens of millions of disagreeable people looking to make trouble."

"As an ad medium, the web is a much better yellow pages and a much worse television."

"Marketers prefer precise answers that are wrong to imprecise answers that are right."

"Brand studies last for months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and generally have less impact on business than cleaning the drapes."

"The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with it is going to go down as one of the great advertising delusions of all time."

"Nobody really knows what "creativity" is. Every year thousands of people take a pilgrimage to find out. This involves flying to Cannes, snorting cocaine, and having sex with smokers."

"Marketers habitually overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior."

"We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product."

"In American business, there is nothing stupider than the previous generation of management."

"If the message is right, who cares what screen people see it on? If the message is wrong, what difference does it make?"

"The only form of product information on the planet less trustworthy than advertising is the shrill ravings of web maniacs."

"There's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend."

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same."